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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2902 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

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I see an opportunity to replace certain human labor at my workplace with humanoid robots. For background, I am an equipment engineer at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company and think my job is somewhat low-risk of getting automated soon.

Pros:

  • Good for my career at the company
  • Improves my skillset in case I ever want to switch jobs. I predict humanoid robots will become much more common as more companies adopt them and their skills widen and improve.

Cons:

  • I am putting people out of a job. This would likely substitute for people instead of complement them. The company recently laid off 100s of employees and soon thereafter announced using a robot dog for some of their tasks. Is this just a form of natural selection?
  • Can look bad on me if the robot isn’t as good as promised. There are ways to temper expectations that I plan to do during my pitch to management.

What are The Motte’s opinions on this in regards to:

  • My career development
  • The moral implications of putting low-skilled people out of work
  • Anything else

Are you running a business, or a charity?

My perspective is that your "career development" is mostly illusory. If automating part of your process results in a better product or cheaper manufacturing, perhaps you will get a bonus? Certainly you will get a resume point. Perhaps it will get you a promotion? A raise? You don't seem to think it will result in you, too, being replaced by a machine, at least not immediately, so in terms of self interest it seems like an obvious choice.

As for the moral implications of making low-skilled people unemployed, like... if you don't do it, eventually someone else will, except you will get none of the benefits while still suffering all the possible downsides. There may be public policy arguments about this that matter from a moral or legal perspective, but unless it is your job to make or enforce public policy, then you don't really have a seat at that table.

In the medium-term future (two or three centuries at most), I think that we either get widespread universal basic income, or we get rampant Luddism. Authoritarian governments and relatively culturally homogeneous nations seem likely to weather that transition better than pluralistic democracies, as identitarian competition for resources and handouts ramps up toward infinity. You will contribute to this process no matter what you choose to do in your current role; the best you can do is what is best for yourself, as that is what you have the most control over and the greatest understanding of.

As for the moral implications of making low-skilled people unemployed, like... if you don't do it, eventually someone else will, except you will get none of the benefits while still suffering all the possible downsides.

This is the argument people have used to rationalize all manner of immoral things since time immemorial. It doesn't really hold water, though. If something is immoral, then it doesn't matter that someone else will do the same thing. Morality is about your conduct, not what others do.

As it happens, I don't think that automating jobs is immoral. But I think that if one does, the "someone else will do it" argument doesn't fly.

That's not the work I intended that phrase to do. It was more of a factual observation about the extent to which outcomes are actually (not) within OP's control, which was the overall point of my post.

Specifically, "ought" implies "can." Ensuring that some people are employed might be the right thing to do; say for the purposes of argument that it is in this case. If in such a case it's not really up to you that those people will stay employed, it can't really be a moral requirement that you keep them employed. The claim "if you don't do it, eventually someone else will" is not a justification for any particular course of action, but an empirical claim about the extent to which a certain outcome is likely (not) within OP's control.

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